Philadelphians’ secret guide to Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic

The word Philadelphia comes up in the film Maestro just twice, and only in passing. And yet Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic is Philly-infused, if you know where to look and listen.

To help work up the role of the glamorous conductor-composer, Cooper sat in on Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsals and concerts and was schooled by music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin in the elusive art of conducting. The production is dotted with Philadelphia actors and writers, and Philadelphia musicians and craftspeople provide sounds and props in the movie.

And though the Curtis Institute of Music — the Rittenhouse Square conservatory where Bernstein trained — never appears on screen, a disturbing episode from his days there is fodder for a pivotal scene between Bernstein and daughter Jamie.

The Philadelphia-born, sparkly-eyed Cooper is also writer, director, and a producer of this lyrical film about Bernstein, a singular figure in American culture who composed (West Side Story, much-loved classical works, and one very groovy Mass), led major orchestras (the New York Philharmonic), and whose role as the country’s Chief Classical Explainer produced — sadly — no comparable heirs.

Bernstein, who died in 1990, is a big topic, and the movie misses a lot. Maestro — opening in area theaters Nov. 30/Dec. 1 and streaming on Netflix starting Dec. 20 — is more a portrait of a marriage than a full biopic. There are all kinds of marriages, of course, but the one between Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan) provided a particularly human echo to the tension and ambiguity of Bernstein’s career.

The movie portrays a man deeply in love with his wife yet utterly incapable of giving up men; an artist torn between extroverted impulses as a performer and the solitude it takes to be a composer; and a polymath with one foot in Broadway and another on the stage of Carnegie Hall.

Today some of these category-defiers might be greeted as strengths. In Bernstein’s era, they struck many as dissonant and irreconcilable.

Most conspicuously missing from the film’s gaze are Bernstein and Montealegre, the activists. She was an advocate for social justice, and he routinely answered big world events with musical responses. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bernstein was there with a now-famous Christmas Day performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. His draw to all things political landed him that most un-American of American distinctions: a big, fat file with the FBI.

One of his other notable political statements (also absent from the movie) was a 1973 episode involving the Philadelphia Orchestra. While Eugene Ormandy was with the orchestra at the Kennedy Center in a concert celebrating the inauguration of President Nixon (minus 16 members of the ensemble who objected to the orchestra’s participation), Bernstein was nearby in Washington Cathedral leading Haydn’s Mass in Time of War — a statement against the war in Vietnam.

Bernstein didn’t appear with the Philadelphia Orchestra often — a dozen times between 1948 and 1979 ― but he left strong opinions in his wake.

“Everything felt like a new sensation of energy and emotion, and he could change it all in a heartbeat — love and caress to angular strife and the stress of a street rumble,” recalled retired Philadelphia Orchestra violinist Herold Klein of Bernstein’s visits.

“He knew what he wanted and the orchestra more or less did his bidding,” said orchestra violist Renard Edwards.

But many years later, the orchestra began taking up Bernstein’s compositions in earnest. It was in a 2019 Philadelphia Orchestra production of Candide in Verizon Hall that Cooper and Mulligan were narrators, honing a chemistry that dazzles in the film.

Other Philadelphia connections in the movie: writer Josh Singer (a graduate of Upper Dublin High School); Gideon Glick, who plays Bernstein lover Tommy Cothran (Lower Merion High grad); and Brian Klugman, who took the role of Aaron Copland (Germantown Academy grad). Most of the batons in the film were crafted by Ambler’s Mark Horowitz.

And then there’s Curtis, which drew Bernstein to Philadelphia, a place he called the “city of dust and grit,” where, from 1939 to 1941, you might have run into him in Rittenhouse Square, or downing a sandwich at the Delancey Pharmacy at 22nd and Pine Streets.

Bernstein had never studied conducting before coming to Curtis, where his teacher was the legendary Fritz Reiner, and though he ate it up, in some ways he didn’t fit in at the school. He was perceived by classmates as cocky.

One bizarre run-in at Curtis ended up the basis for a cover story Bernstein used many years later when his young daughter Jamie had heard upsetting rumors about her father’s proclivities. It was jealousy, Bernstein tells his daughter in the film, recalling Curtis decades earlier — an episode that Bernstein relayed at a speech he gave in 1975 at the Bellevue. Musical envy had driven one classmate to bring a gun to school with the intent of murdering Bernstein and others. (The plan was thwarted.)

Such jealousies plagued him all his life and led to invented gossip, he tells his daughter unconvincingly in Maestro.

So it’s not true?, Jamie asks her father. “No, darling,” he says.

The rest of his 1975 Curtis speech would have brought Maestro a more complex main character and a way to bring him into the present. He reminisces, but, Bernstein being Bernstein, he also gets political, presciently so.

He talks about how he left Curtis in 1941 — the year “our country went to war against fascism and helped to destroy it — we hope,” he said. He lists what happened next: the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Watergate, and more.

And then:

“And in all of this there has been an increasingly sophisticated mishandling of truth. It gets harder and harder to sift the lies, harder to know what is true.”

Among the conundrums of contemporary society he throws out: questions about higher education, morality, greed, the avant-garde, and whether God is dead.

“Can we artists really be involved in trying to answer them? Yes, I say we are involved. I know I am involved. I could never make music if I weren’t.”

Maestro opens Nov. 30/Dec. 1 at area theaters, including the Landmark Ritz Five, PFS Bourse, Bryn Mawr Film Institute, and the Hiway Theater in Jenkintown.